Telling Stories with Archive
With the publication of 'The ethical use of archival visuals: memories of 'Vietnam: A Television History', industry stalwart Kenn Rabin has co-written a book on the often little understood art - technically and morally - of using archive footage in media programming. Here he looks at some of the crucial issues.
I first paid serious attention to the use of archival visuals to tell history on television (apart from its casual use as “stock shots”) when I saw the Thames Television World War II series, The World at War, broadcast in the U.K. beginning in 1973 and in the 
U.S. in 1974. In fact, the series had at least one notable predecessor: The Great War (about World War I), had been made in 1964, but, according to Sir Jeremy Isaacs, the producers in some cases let “generic” or incorrect footage stand in for specific battles and events. This had also been the case with what was the most high-profile U.S. historical documentary series to date, Victory at Sea, broadcast by NBC in 1952-1953.
In 1980, separate proposals by PBS producer L. Richard Ellison and noted journalist Stanley Karnow were combined into one project by WGBH, the public television station in Boston. Vietnam: A Television History was born. I had been working with Bill Moyers in New York, but moved to Boston to become the Archivist for the series. Ultimately, Vietnam became a coproduction of WGBH, the U.K.’s Channel 4, and Pathé Cinema/Antenne 2 in Paris. The Paris producer was responsible for the first two episodes (the “backstory” about the French in Vietnam); the rest of the series, covering the American involvement, was produced by American and British teams working in tandem in Boston.
Several of the key production people from World at War, including J
erome Kuehl, Martin Smith, and the extraordinary researcher, Raye Farr, came to Boston to participate in the production. Martin and Raye became my “gurus” since they had been through the process before (both later would be associated with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC). Also joining our staff was Lawrence W. Lichty, a professor at Northwestern University, and an expert in the American news coverage of Vietnam. He came to Boston carting forty filing cabinets full of tapes, written notes, and computerized logs.
In the fall of 1980, before production began, came “school.” Internationally respected journalists, historians, filmmakers—anyone and everyone thought to be of use to the project came and conducted seminars. Many disagreed with each other or provided prismatic, alternate views of events. It was a wonderful type of boot camp, and I don’t know of any other documentary or series that has done this, beyond Eyes on the Prize. Certainly this process is lost to the quickie formulaic cable documentaries, and lost, probably, to tighter budgets even on more carefully crafted documentaries.
Because the Vietnam war was still so close (Saigon fell in 1975 and we began production in late 1980), emotions ran high in our production office at various moments. It was a positive thing that we all had strongly-held and often disparate opinions. When we began production, Richard Ellison provided a staff-wide memo essentially saying, “Never assume. Never simply trust that there is one right answer. Going into the process, trust your own opinions least.”
Vietnam probably used the “purest” historical documentary vocabulary ever. Every statement made by the narrator, even every statement made by participants, either in archival footage or in interviews we conducted, was checked and rechecked for accuracy; a “bible” was created to keep track of every statistic and historical point made in each of the (originally) 13 episodes. In addition, there were some vocabulary rules: No music could be added to anything in the show (except for opening and closing titles) unless it was live sound from the archival source (band music at a parade, or sound from a soldier’s transistor radio, for example). There was no underscore. Any sound effects added to silent footage had to be vetted by the Imperial War Museum (and in most cases provided by them); therefore the IWM located specific sound effects based on videotapes of fine cuts. They provided only the sound effects that matched a particular weapon, such as an AK-40, or, say, a “Huey” helicopter, and only if it was seen on-screen. No footage could be manipulated as to speed, in order to avoid eliciting any emotional effect not originally intended. Freeze-frames were allowed (in an emotionally neutral way), but they were used sparingly (and often for the last frame of the episode, over which the closing titles would appear).
This might seem, to some
, as if Vietnam’s producers and staff established the Dogme95 of documentaries. However, even as the series was being broadcast in the United States, the organization Accuracy in Media (AIM) created an hour-long rebuttal, narrated by Charlton Heston, and including archival that had been manipulated, both in speed and with accompanying ominous music. AIM’s “documentary” argued that our series was biased and our conclusions wrong-headed (actually, we’d made no conclusions, at least not that I was aware of). AIM strong-armed PBS into broadcasting their show after our series had finished its run, and the AIM show was followed by a studio discussion program.
Such was the level of emotion about the subject, still, in 1983 (when our series hit air). As you might imagine, in this instance, our “bible” came in handy, and we could refute each argument AIM made with confirmed facts and figures.
Unfortunately, Vietnam as it was originally broadcast over 13 weeks in 1983-1984 has been replaced by a re-edited and remixed version done for the PBS series American Experience. This version first aired in 1997, and runs 11 hours. American Experience removed the final “Legacy” episode, which was outdated (although an update would have been in order), pared the two French episodes down to one, and made other internal cuts to the show as originally presented.
Was Vietnam too pure a form of documentary filmmaking? Did we sacrifice emotion for even-handedness and historical accuracy? If we are to believe the hundreds of letters we received, many from Vietnam veterans and their families, we did our job well, and the emotional content came through; perhaps “less was more.” Politically, we received exactly as much hate mail from one “side” as we did from the other, but very much more praise than criticism.
In Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years (produced between 1985 and 1989) the staff of Blackside, Inc. (including me as Series Archivist) used music throughout, since it was essential to the civil rights movement—but always music that the participants would have heard during the time period under discussion. Sound effects were added to silent film most conservatively: If there wasn’t an onscreen clue that a sound might have been heard, it wasn’t allowed. We could not add the sound of a child screaming, if no child was seen screaming onscreen. We could not add the sound of gunshots if no one was firing a gun onscreen.
Each documentary faces its own set of problems, and the ones that break new ground often create their own rules, establish their own vocabulary. Form follows function. The important thing is that the rules be transparent to the audience. If you want to add music, fine, but do it in a responsible way that doesn’t alter the integrity of the original artifact.
You might even want to alter the integrity for some deeper meaning. Filmmakers have created whole new genres 
by doing this. But the audience must understand you are doing it. Establish your vocabulary, communicate it elegantly to the audience in the earliest moments of your film, and then they will know where in the highly subjective worlds of documentary, drama, and “art film” they are situated. Historically, one needs only look at the GPO films produced under John Grierson (Coal Face, Night Mail); more recently, the films of Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War), “found footage” filmmakers Craig Baldwin (Spectres of the Spectrum) and Jay Rosenblatt (Human Remains), as well as numerous art installation pieces that use audiovisual archival materials in postmodern or transformative ways to see how archival use can be less than “pure” (in the Vietnam sense), but still ethical and effective.
No film can be purely objective; it is not within nature of film to be so. Unless a film consists of pure rushes, events are arranged, compressed for time, and manipulated by the editor. Even in this circumstance, someone has chosen what to frame in and what to frame out. Usually, music is added and color, brightness, and contrast are timed in postproduction. Vietnam simply represents one end of a spectrum. On the other end is irresponsible documentary filmmaking (take your pick of examples). But for the creative producer, there are numerous colors in between.
Kenn Rabin is coauthor, with Sheila Curran Bernard, of 'Archival Storytelling: A Filmmaker’s Guide to Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music' published by Focal Press/Elsevier. The book includes a chapter-length roundtable discussion with filmmakers, archivists, administrators, and academics concerning the ethics involved in using archival materials.
